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Tag: health 2.0

Using technology to manage personal health care is not new, as most of us have pedometers, weighing scales etc., to regularly or occasionally check our progress.

For people with certain type of diseases there are variety of devices in the market to monitor glucose to blood pressure and what have you, to monitor the progress or digress from the recommended care plan.

What’s missing though, is that these devices are not connected to anyone – for example a care provider, a family member, care team – who are interested in the patient’s well being and care progress.

That’s where Continue Health Alliance , an alliance of more than 200 companies, comes in – as stated in their mission – to enable an eco-system of interoperable personal health systems for that empower people & organizations to better manage their health and wellness.

Here is a video from Continua that shows the outcomes of a connected personal health care.

If it sounds like the StarTrek of personal healthcare, here is where Continua sees the opportunity in the cream of the pyramid (western world)

“Once upon a time, going to your doctor was simple. You knew his first name, or perhaps just called him “Doc.” He lived just down the street and made house calls. And if you were sick, you would see him that day, because, well, you were sick” … that’s how the story starts for Hello Health! (founded by an American and Canadian in NY)

Hello Health attempts to make healthcare simple and accessible to patients and promises to taking medicine to its basics. With Hello Health, you can interact with your doc in your favourite means of technology. If you have query and you would like to just e-mail, you just e-mail and its Free! You make your appointments online and access your records as well.

At the primary care level, as the first point of contact for the patients, accessibility and responsive care is crucial for patients and especially for patients with chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease and COPD.

So is Hello Health disruptive ? Absolutely in private healthcare market like US, its bringing the medicine back to basics and attacks the complex payer/physician centric model. In market economics, as the value propositions of the consumers change, new players emerge to provide the missing value and this is often called as invisible hand and works in most cases. It remains to be seen whether it will work in healthcare.

Can a service like Hello Health, work in a single payer system like Canada ? Of course, it can, provided it meets the regulatory requirements of the government and the docs adopt the government certified EMR

Hello Health!

(Electronic Medical Record), of course with lots of incentives.

Accessing a primary case physician is relatively easy (caveat: if you have a family physician) in the Canadian Healthcare system and every one is aware of the improvement needed in terms of technology adoption.

In US, the question remains whether the proposed mandatory legislation by Obama administration can hinder a service like this. Boston Globe has a good coverage on this. http://bit.ly/WE67p

Also this type of pay for use service only serves the basic healthcare needs and Can it fix the completely ailing US healthcare system, where complex care consumes most of the resources in the system ?

It remains to be seen and the quest for solving the healthcare puzzle continues.